IN OUR MIDST

A blameless family of first-generation German immigrants, running a restaurant in small-town Indiana, learns harsh lessons in nationalism after World War II categorizes them as alien enemies.

Good people suffer terrible injustices when war reasserts tribal loyalties. That’s the message of Jensen’s (The Sisters, 2011, etc.) black-and-white depiction of the treatment of German Americans during the Second World War, a story similar to but less well known than the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during that conflict. The Aust family, with roots in Koblenz, finds itself suddenly the subject of rough FBI attention after Pearl Harbor forces the U.S. into war. First Nina Aust is arrested and interrogated; then, when she is freed, she discovers her husband, Otto, and sons, Kurt and Gerhard, have been incarcerated too. Meanwhile the family business has been stripped and vandalized, both by the authorities and the previously friendly, now antagonistic townspeople. Otto and Kurt find themselves imprisoned behind the wire fences of a miserable camp in North Dakota that also houses a contingent of Japanese detainees; Gerhard is sent to a sodden, health-threatening camp in Tennessee. Improvement of a kind comes when Nina agrees to voluntary imprisonment in a “family camp,” which at least reunites the four Austs in a scorching, barren corner of Texas called Crystal City. The pitiless conditions of this new prison, threats of deportation, and violent intimidation from Nazi factions render life even more testing. The Austs struggle to remain optimistic about a new start once hostilities are over, unaware of another avalanche of catastrophe just ahead. Jensen’s plain tale does justice to the brutal treatment suffered by Germans and other immigrants from hostile countries, but the novel delivers less a vibrant narrative, more a social and political horror story acted out by simple, stiff characters.

A sad, and sadly still relevant, history lesson in fictional form.